Today, a tremendous number of online services and applications are available. The existing online services are related to virtually every aspect of life, including work, relationships, health, entertainment, news, etc. Access to these online services typically only requires an Internet connection. However, the abundance of services also causes information overload. As a result, disorganized information is floating around many users' lives and brains. Instead of positively influencing our lives, the services become cumbersome and are often neglected. In particular, the advent of social media has made it easier to share information with more people and make connections with people who we otherwise would not. However, the ubiquity of social media (such as through social networks) has created a further explosion in the information content of our lives and relationships. This information clutter reduces a user's productivity and shortens the user's attention span.
Typically, ideas begin with private thoughts that are later refined and shared to friends and, perhaps, the public at large. Who these ideas are to be shared with often evolve over time. Existing online services are not amenable to this process of developing ideas and deciding where to share them at a later time. For example, existing social media forces ideas immediately into the public domain. Information or media posted on social networks (e.g. Facebook.com, Twitter.com, and Flickr.com) or blogs (e.g. Wordpress.com and Blogger.com) are immediately accessible by other users. To post information in existing social media requires upfront cognitive decision-making related to the audience level of the information at the time the information was collected or generated. This process does not match the way human brains function.
Systems, such as emailing to oneself and note-taking applications (e.g. Evernote.com) exist for users to store private thoughts. However, these existing systems are not integrated with other services or applications. In other words, a user would have to access and sign on to multiple applications simultaneously to utilize information stored in the application storing the private thoughts. Because of the lack of integration and inconvenience of these systems, they are seldom used, therefore, ideas are often forgotten. In addition, existing note-taking applications require users to provide all of the information content to the note. By forcing a user to provide all of the information content, the note-taking process is typically tedious, error-prone, and incomplete.
The semantic web is evolving on the web in a direction where semantics of information and services available on the web are defined. It has become possible to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content. The semantic web makes it possible to perform more sophisticated queries, such as finding the best prices on travel or products across different services, aggregrating reviews across many services, identifying location-based data and associated services and reviews across websites. In other words, associations can be created based on user's specific queries and the result from the data services on the available on the web. The result of these associations depends on the level of sophistication and investment of the user or the sophistication of the specific web service designed for a specific purpose (e.g. a vertical search service). The services rely on human interpretation and intervention to guide their quality of result.
Another use of the semantic web relates to statistical analyses and studies to determine relationships, trends and predictions. Such statistical models, for example, are used to determine the probable relevance of a search result to a user, yet searching has become more convoluted than ever, with search results often containing many or more irrelevant results than relevant and useful results.
There is a need in the art to develop an architecture enabling users to access results of web services (e.g. designed by developers) in an automated manner based on the user's intent, and not based on the sophistication of user's query or the sophistication of any of the web services that the user already knows about or chooses. The success of this architectures relies on the fact that web services will constantly improve their service and data as well as more web services will become available on the web.
The invention addresses at least the above-described difficult problems and advances the art with a semantic note taking and enriching system and method.